


At a Later Date

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Series: And Other Salutations [2]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: Established Relationship, Friendship, Gen, Living Together, M/M, Season/Series 02, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:27:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22840978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: Donna’s not one to pry when it comes to these things and Josh isn’t one to readily admit, but sometimes the stars align and answers are found organically.It also helps that Sam’s there to make some sense of it all.
Relationships: Donna Moss & Sam Seaborn, Josh Lyman & Donna Moss, Josh Lyman/Sam Seaborn
Series: And Other Salutations [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1631137
Comments: 7
Kudos: 77





	At a Later Date

**Author's Note:**

> i've been trying to post this ALL day but i instead managed to edit it up to and even during the last minute lmao

DONNA’S PLACE

A TOO-REGULAR SATURDAY NIGHT

Donna has picked the phone up three times, but every time she manages the will to pull it off the hook, she simultaneously has a swell, a surge if you will, of independence. Or maybe it’s courage. There’s also a very good chance that it’s embarrassment, maybe nausea, but hell it could just be acid reflux. All the takeout she’s been eating lately, it’s probably that last one.

She has the phone in her hand again and at the risk of definitively putting her name on insanity, she tries dialing this time for the hell of it. Not hitting call yet, but dialing the home number she knows there’s only about a thirty percent chance of connecting because sometimes, on Saturdays like these, he leaves it off the hook and lets his pager do the leg work.

Donna’s tired. Exponentially, superfluously, over and under tired. She also has the hankering for pizza, but her roommate’s working a double and the thought of eating it alone on her couch on a Saturday when there really isn’t anything good on cable is just a touch depressing. Which brings her back to the phone.

“What the hell,” she mutters, mashing call and tucking it to her ear like she does every day from six, seven, eight a.m. onto whenever they let her go. She misses it, honestly, in the few hours that she doesn’t live and breathe her little cubicle and the West Wing halls, but she despises it all the same. Mostly because it’s left her social calendar so bare that her first thought of who to call on a Saturday night isn’t whoever people normally call on Saturday nights and is instead Josh Lyman.

Right, the ringing phone.

If he doesn’t pick up, she’ll just move on, she’ll breeze right past this, she’ll—well, Joey’s three hours behind and probably working late, so booting up AOL and doing that thing where they try not to say that they miss one another isn’t in the cards for the night, but she’ll find something to do.

“Hello?”

Donna sighs. “Hi, Josh.”

“Hi, Donna,” he parrots back in her same tone. There’s the low rustle of the TV in the background when they pause after their greetings, so she thinks maybe she’s caught him at the right time.

“So, how’s it going?”

He snorts inelegantly and she imagines he’s probably passing off the receiver from one hand to the other like he does when he gets a little flummoxed by a call. “Good,” he says, amused. “How’s it going for you?”

“Fine, great. Listen.” She sighs again. Embarrassment, she decides. That’s what this is. “What are you doing right now?”

“Uh, well. Casual things. Manly things. Drinking beer and watching sports.”

“Right. What are you actually doing?”

Now it’s his turn to sigh, but apparently his reply to her doesn’t take precedence since she hears him mumble, “’s Donna,” to someone. He didn’t even cover the receiver all the way, nor did he take it far away enough from his mouth because deception isn’t a skill he possesses after eight p.m., apparently. He’s like one of those little furry things from _Gremlins._

Embarrassment slowly but surely morphs to mortification, but she’s good with it. She can roll with the punches and extricate herself from—whatever this is. It’s been a few weeks since she even found out Josh is seeing anyone and that had been a Herculean task in and itself. So as much as she wants to find out who it is exactly he’s making his aside to—she thinks the assistant thing gives her a predisposition for needing to know things—she knows he’ll tell her when he gets the whim. Given the circumstances, she’d rather not tip that scale when he’d been so, y’know, un-Josh about the whole thing with her and Joey.

“Uh, yeah, I’m watching TV, I’m relaxing, it’s this new thing I’m trying.”

“Is it anything that’ll threaten national security or embarrass any of our friends—the thing you’re watching on TV?” Merciful God, let us get called into work, she thinks. Anything to not have to be on this call.

“You friends with Tony Soprano? No, I don’t know what it is—what’re we watching again?” he asks to his off-screen guest, voice lazy and clear and Donna realizes that he’s not even trying to make it sound like he’s alone which is—nice, actually, flattering with each degree to which he trusts her with this.

“Am I interrupting something?” she asks as soon as she realizes she can acknowledge the elephant on the line. At the same time, he says, “We don’t actually know what we’re watching.”

“So I’m definitely interrupting.”

“No, you’re not,” he replies, “What’s going on, Donna?”

“It’s nothing. I’m serious, Josh. Go back to your secret date night watching the maybe-Sopranos. Which, by the way, if that’s your idea of romance, my sincere apologies to your dating pool—”

“It’s not the _Sopranos,_ Donna. It’s, I don’t know, it’s a rerun of something, the guy’s in it and the girl’s in it, and it’s a thing that’s on TV right now.”

Placidly, she shoots back, “Wow, I’m swooning over here. Tell me more Casanova.”

“Ha-ha.” There’s the slosh of a beer bottle, then, faux-casual, “You’re okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m—you know, I’m not calling you from a payphone outside a condemned factory that houses an underground party ring, and I’m not calling you from lock-up, so I’m fine. Scout’s Honor.”

“Where’s left then?”

She blows out a breath, takes her defeat with poise. “Home. I’m at home and I was going to see if you were too because I don’t want to sit here in the dark by myself and then go to bed by ten, you happy?”

“That you have the opportunity to go to bed by ten? Yeah, I think that’s great, means I’m doing really well at my job this week.”

“Josh—”

“Do you still have that key?” he asks over her.

That key, that key. Do you still have that key that my super had to make for you after I got shot and I couldn’t get to the door by myself? Do you still have that key that I told you was for emergencies only, but there was a while there where every time you came over could have been an emergency? Do you still have it, the one that’s never known your hands not to tremble? The one you used to bury in your palm until it turned the skin there a hellish red because the pressure was the only thing that would keep you from crying before you came in to bring me lunch? That one, do you still have it?

“No, I sold it off to the highest bidder and paid my half of the rent.”

“That’d explain all the angry graffiti on my walls.”

“Yes, I still have it.”

There’s a brief conference, not away from the receiver, but he’s at least got his hand all the way over it this time so she hears only the bass of his voice and maybe the bass of another, but it’s all too small coming through the wires for her to make any sense of it beyond hearing him ask, “That okay?”

Apparently, that’s fine because the next clear thing she hears is, “Let yourself in, but take your shoes off, there’s a thing with the floors.”

It takes her longer than it should to get to his place, but in her mind she’s being courteous. Giving them time to prepare.

Also, she doesn’t want to look too eager for human contact because Josh really doesn’t need added to his ego that she’s, of all things, excited to see him.

JOSH’S PLACE

A NEW-REGULAR SATURDAY NIGHT

“I’m letting myself in,” she calls in reminder, eyes still cast down as she wiggles the key to and from the lock, balancing a pizza box in her hand that’s hot enough her palm has gone sort of numb.

“Yeah, Donna, I know. You’d make a terrible cat burglar.”

“Damn,” she says as she kicks her shoes off. “What am I supposed to do with that black and white striped shirt I just bought? Or the burlap sack with the dollar sign on it?”

There’s already two pairs of patent leathers just inside the door and it strikes her as surprisingly sweet. Almost quaint in a way she wouldn’t really attribute to anywhere that Josh is. He can be kind, sentimental even, but quaint seems like too leisurely a descriptor.

“I don’t know if you’ve eaten, but I brought pizza. Well, that was mostly because I wanted pizza, but I got enough to share, so it’s the second thought that counts.”

Best to just be casual, she thinks as she rounds the corner with the box held loftily. It’s like when she used to carry trays and wore an apron around her waist and could recite the day’s specials off the tip of her tongue. _And what sides would you like with that?_

In junior high, before she’d considered what she felt more than what others wanted her to feel, she’d brought a girl from class home to work on a Social Studies project. What she couldn’t remember now was what the project had been for, but there was still the pang in her memory of the inordinately large crush she’d had on that girl. Not that she realized what it at the time. In the moment, actually, as she introduced her parents to that perfectly nice girl, all she could remember was desperately thinking _please act normal, please don’t make a big deal out of this, please don’t embarrass me._

It’s possibly a childish thought to have, but even though they’re all long adults, she’s always been in the camp of ‘Josh has the capacity to be a thirteen-year-old boy even on his best days’ so maybe her naturalness will be a comfort.

“I’d invite you over more if I knew it came with free food,” a not-Josh voice jokes from the couch, and Donna, for her part, doesn’t skip a beat.

Even though she should, right? She should definitely skip a beat at the fact that there on the couch, hair slightly mussed but personage otherwise perfectly serene, is Josh. And there beside him, looking a little rumpled but worse for wear in no other way, is Sam.

The thing is that most of the time, there where Josh dwell, so doth Sam abide. It’s more of a statistical anomaly—barring only national crisis that stations them on other sides of the building— _not_ to find them about five to ten feet from one another, and it has been for as long as Donna can remember. So this picture is almost normal to a level that’s kindly comical.

It’s just that normally Sam isn’t wearing a Harvard sweatshirt of which Josh is leaned preposterously close against the shoulder of. And Sam’s hand, usually, isn’t balanced over Josh’s thigh.

(Sam in Harvard wear is, of course, cataclysmic enough in and of itself; if she had a dollar for every time she heard the words Princeton or Duke in conjunction with Sam Seaborn, she’d probably be on a beach somewhere instead of having this revelation.)

“If it wasn’t for the bracing showing of new human emotion from you, Josh, I think I’d have to kill you for not telling me,” she says, hiding a smile to Josh’s purposefully casual grin. Smug, smug bastard, she thinks. Then, kinder: he looks comfortable.

“But not Sam?”

“No, not Sam,” she agrees as she plops into the armchair she’d spent most of her time in when she’d spent all her time here. “Sam’s my favorite person in the White House.”

“Someone, somewhere, owes me ten dollars. Wait—it’s you,” Sam tells Josh, his mouth quickly breaking into a grin when Josh pinches his side for the comment. He takes his hand off his thigh only long enough to swat half-heartedly at the offense, muttering something like _will you stop it_ on the coattails of a bright laugh. It’s unrestrained, like waves breaching the shoreline.

Donna has never heard Sam laugh like that in her life, but by the way Josh looks over at him, she thinks he has. It strikes her how Sam can’t even see his face from the angle they’re at—Josh’s just looking at him like that because he can. Like his laugh is the best damn thing he’s ever heard.

This dissolves into snatches of chattering wit that Donna doesn’t strain to hear, not when she’s steadily unfolding the pizza box in her lap and rearranging both the toppings on her slice and the truths she knows about the world. First thing’s first, the sky’s blue, second thing’s next, Josh and Sam are Josh _and_ Sam and it all makes some kind of cosmic sense.

The third truth comes as she takes the first bite, stringy cheese hanging from her mouth when she leans forward to drop the box on the coffee table. She sees Sam’s glasses already strewn there by the TV remote and it makes her think of the shoes discarded by the door.

Those make her think, unbidden, about the Harvard sweatshirt and the fact that Sam hadn’t said ‘to my place’ but instead ‘invite you over’ and Donna, y’know, Donna’s pretty good at sussing things out. She’s Head Susser to the Deputy Chief of Staff of the White House.

“Are you two living together?” she asks unceremoniously. Act natural had been her mantra when she’d thought she’d be meeting someone new, but this is _Josh_ and _Sam_ and she’s not going to tailor anything for them.

Sam’s eyebrows go up to where his hair sits loose and sweet over his forehead. He’s obviously showered and combed all the product out of it, a style she hasn’t seen since the campaign trail when he used to stumble downstairs to shove half a bagel in his mouth and try not to fall asleep in someone’s pulpy orange juice. But since they moved into the West Wing, Sam looking anything other than at least halfway put-together is like the thought of her great aunt Birdy without that thick rouge she wore every day up to and including the day she died.

“No,” Sam says, shaking his head. “No, we converge here sometimes,” he adds, and she knows he’s full of shit. Tells him as much when she laughs at the turn of phrase. _Converge_ , what are they, sports fans on the day of the big game?

“Sam’s place is too nice,” Josh throws in unhelpfully.

“It’s depressing and, I think, anachronistic.”

“He means it’s swanky.”

“Which no one would ever accuse this place of being,” Sam says idly and gets a huffing laugh for. Donna hears the preciseness, though. Not ‘ _your_ place’ and not ‘ _our_ place,’ but ‘ _this_ place’ which is just far enough removed to be practiced.

“What I’m hearing is that you live together,” Donna reiterates, drawing them back to focus. She should wrangle, if this whole politics thing doesn’t work out. Sheep and cattle would be under her thumb in a matter of moments. Cats? No problem, she’s got Senior White House Staff on her résumé.

“No, see, no, because _that_ would be hubristic. That would be tempting fate to say,” Sam says, the hand holding his beer gesturing pointedly. “We just happen to cohabitate for most of the week.”

“Y’see? I keep him around to do the crosswords _._ ”

“Shocking, I know, but sometimes the one in my copy just isn't enough for me.” He looks relieved to take the out instead of staying there, fumbling around for truth-adjacent explanations.

She tucks her back more firmly into the chair. “Don't they print the same crossword in every copy?” she asks to humor them. She’s learned that when they get like this, eventually they’ll either talk themselves into a corner or stumble into truth. 

“I answer the second one in Latin,” Sam intones, his voice dry and quick in that way where Donna can't tell if he's joking or not because this is Sam after all. Dungeons n’ Dragons camp Sam. Once bet a hundred dollars in a hotel lobby that he could recite more of the Constitution from start to finish than Josh could and _won_ Sam.

So the mental image of Sam rehearsing Latin under his breath on a Sunday morning while Josh clatters around in the kitchen is somehow ridiculous and fitting enough that she almost does laugh. Maybe this is his way of breaking the undercurrent of tension she still can’t tell is real or imagined.

If they want to play ball, she decides, if they want to joke and talk in code, she's fine with that. “How long have you been doing that second crossword?” She feels like she could stand for a few more answers to the obvious, but if they don't want to tell her she won’t push.

Sam inhales. “This time around, ten months?”

“And a half,” Josh puts in.

“And the half is what matters most?” he wonders, but turns his words back to Donna to add, “But this wasn't, I mean we didn't.” He gestures haplessly at the apartment so as not to name it. “Until about…”

Josh tips the neck of his beer back and forth like he can tally off the time in which they've been cohabitating. Rooming. Whatever it is when you can't say living together because you think it will surely jinx you and maybe ruin your lives in the process but you don’t want to stop the act.

“Five months ago,” Sam finishes.

“He had to brush up on his Latin,” Josh says over the lip of his beer, over-enunciating through a self-satisfied smile.

Donna does the math in her head, but she knows they can tell what she's doing. They're all polite enough not to acknowledge that that would’ve been after Rosslyn; right after Josh got out of the hospital, at least. She would’ve been in her heyday of keeping Josh company then and she hadn’t even noticed. Looking back, she chalked any extra clothes up to clutter, any shifted items to a restless patient, the miscellaneous groceries to CJ or Toby or, yes, Sam swinging by and then clearing out.

And honestly she can't blame him. There were days where she thought about moving in, too. Just so she could keep an eye on Josh, just so she could see the rise and fall of his chest and know that he was all right and would keep being all right from one minute to the next. The nights were always the worst, but the days weren’t anything to sneeze at either.

Donna loves Josh. Even though he's infuriating, he's one of the best people she's ever known, and if she put her mind to it, she'd probably come up with the fact that he's her best friend. But here in this wild silence—where Josh's hand unwittingly rubs at the spot on his chest where there had once been a hole and then stitching and now a reminder, and Sam shifts his hand to touch Josh’s back, just over the spot he always scrubs at on the bad days—she knows this is a different kind of loving.

What it must have been to sit in that waiting room and to save face on national TV and to stand on his doorstep and not fall apart. What it must have taken to hold back in the face of horror just so no one got the wrong idea.

“This time around?” she echoes, the words finally catching up with her. They’re easier to take on than the burden of the last few months.

Sam's eyebrows rise again when he realizes what he's done and Josh clears his throat. “Best not get into that now?” the former tries, voice ticking up there at the end in what Donna thinks is—and oh, this is too good to be true—his own kind of embarrassment.

She almost chokes on her laugh trying to hurriedly ask, “Oh my god, how long has this been going on?” This just the kind of thing she files away for when Josh is being boastful and she needs to snap him out of it with a few choice words.

“It was…” Sam starts to Josh's, “Y'know, it's been…”

“Before inauguration?” she asks.

Sam: “Oh yeah.”

“Before the campaign trail?” That right there has already been what, three years ago?

Josh: “Uh-huh.”

She hesitates, not sure if she wants to know, but decides to jump feet-first and get this all out of the way. “ _On_ the campaign trail?”

Josh grins and she waves her hand to make him stop before he starts. She can see him debating it, but Sam cuts in before havoc can be wrought.

“Donna,” he says, calling her eyes to his unholy blues. He looks impossible, wide-eyed and weather-worn. He smiles with a sort of bend to it that's well in practice, making the lines at the corners of his mouth dip in. “We’ve never had to—it’s hard to explain.”

“I’ve got time.”

He nudges a finger into the corner of his eye, rubbing away the seconds so as to gather his bearings. “Am I on my own here?” he mumbles out of the side of his lips.

“You’re just so good with words, Sam,” Josh jokes, resting his head back against the couch cushion and effectively ending that line of questioning.

“Well, I guess—it was a risk we couldn’t afford to take back then. So Josh went off and found his way on various campaigns and I went off and got a little lost in New York until we found each other again.”

Josh remarks, “Until I came and found you,” but it rings far more tender than Donna thinks he’d meant for it to.

“While we were campaigning, though, that wasn't—we didn't let it go far. We made other promises before we ever promised anything else to each another, and that meant something. Finding a real candidate, helping affect real change, that was always the plan.”

He stops, trying to find his words, but it seems all he can grab hold of is amusement. “I guess what I mean to say is that we tried being friends, a few times actually, but we were never all that good at it in the first place. And after—” he stumbles over the name, but finds his footing just the same, “So many years had already gone by. It was worth the risk.”

His face is goofy, that’s the only way she can think to describe it, broken open and saying all these things that she realizes they’ve been holding onto all this time. How they could stand it she’ll never know.

“And this time?”

“What about it?”

“Hey, this time I'm doing what I should've done all the other times,” Josh cuts in because he’s the one who knows what she means without her having to spell it out. They have that way about them sometimes, but it's only ever once in a full moon. Tonight’s one of those nights.

Donna smiles, the kind that's slight and whispers like a secret but makes her jaw thrum with how happy she is. She implores innocence to shoot back, “Not being stupid?”

He mutters a laugh. “Yeah, something like that.”

“So, you and Joey?” Sam asks with that pleasant tone of his. Like he doesn't even realize he's playing Donna at her own game and winning. She knows he knows exactly what he’s doing, though. She knows he has the capacity for sleight of hand. Uncaring about his law degree, she thinks redirection shouldn't be a skill Sam Seaborn has on top of everything else.

Balking over greasy fingers, she leans off the side of the chair to reach for another slice of pizza. “You told him?”

She's not mad by any stretch of the imagination, but she _is_ still configuring it in her head, this Josh and Sam that come home at the end of the day, for starters, never mind that they’ve got the time to discuss her.

“Of course I told him,” Josh starts seriously, but it quickly runs into that oh, so casual wit she’s surprised she hasn’t strangled him for, “I'd already relayed that you were trying to set me up with her a few weeks ago, so this was at least three nights of extra fodder.”

 _Fodder_. When he says things like that she wonders how she didn’t realize before now he’s been spending more time with Sam. A regular chuckle club over here.

“I wasn’t really trying to set you two up!” she cries, indignant and fighting off laughter. “And I didn’t _know_ you were busy loving away after Sam for most your life, so you can’t hold it against me.”

Sam gives a clumsy snort that he tries to hide, but it’s enough that Donna turns her wagging pizza on him. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten you, Romeo, I’m making my way around. You’re lucky I was too busy taking calls from bumbling aides and getting faxes to notice you doing the same.”

Their responses are overlapping, Josh's blithe, “When you put it like that it sounds so romantic, Donna,” and Sam's ersatz bewilderment in, “Have I stumbled into a winter wedding?”

Josh’s reply is automatic, “You can't do spring because of your hay fever.”

Sam nods, says to Donna as he gestures blindly to his left at Josh, “He remembers my hay fever, why wouldn't I want to spend my life loving him?”

It’s sweet, but it’s not enough to deter her. “I'm worried about your two’s ideals on romance.”

“It wasn’t the Sopranos.” Josh insists and she has to bite down another laugh.

“I think, statistically,” Sam cuts in, “my failed engagement probably has something to do with my romantic ideals. But that’s me—I still haven’t been able to figure him out.”

“And mystery keeps the love alive.”

“You got any other snappy witticisms, Aristotle?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Sam shakes his head, but still mutters with quiet fondness, “Wouldn’t I just.”

Donna’s chest clutters under the weight of it and something spills between her ribs that takes her too long to name, but when she does, when she _does_ , she calls it relief and cups her hands around it.

She doesn’t think she’s ever seen love like this. No, in one way she’s seen it, she’s sat and listened with her bleeding heart to people’s stories, she’s nodded along all while keeping to herself the thought that it isn’t something she’ll ever get to have. Maybe she could have the touches behind closed doors, the slow smiles and regretful longing, but not the end, not the creature comforts of being notched together on the couch on a Saturday night or the promise of more than just one day at a time.

Come to think of it, she’s always felt the need to believe that these things, these good things, don’t happen in this city. And there was some kind of vindication in thinking that after what happened with Karen, like maybe she hadn’t been wasting time. Since she started whatever it is she’s started with Joey she’s tried hanging onto the thought so no one can say she let her heart get broken again.

But here in front of her is her best friend and his best friend and here’s something real and Donna thinks, for the first time, that it’s not impossible. That if things keep going the way they’re going with Joey it won’t have to come to some coast-to-coast end just as soon as it gets its legs. That there are ways these things can go and some of them overlap in a Venn diagram that to her eyes looks a lot like repose. That if there’s an after Joey, there’s still possibility and it isn’t all the way it has been.

“Donna?” She looks up, finds Sam sitting by himself, one arm braced over the back of the couch and face slipping from concern toward knowing. “Everything okay over there? You look…”

“I’m just thinking. Sam, you’re happy?”

She doesn’t know where the words came from, blurted over the end of her tongue and lacking any kind of grace. But at the back of her mind there’s Josh telling her he’s the happiest he’s ever been and the way they look at one another and all these ways that Sam has silently cared for him and it’s enough for her to shake off any embarrassment because if she doesn’t ask, if she doesn’t know for sure, the wondering will swallow her whole.

She trusts Sam’s word more than anything and admires the hell out of him just the same. It hadn’t always been like that. Right after he’d joined up with Bartlet she’d been a little dubious on what it was exactly he was going to do. Back then he was a hot-shot whiz-kid only in a reputation that Josh had written for her, and when she’d seen him for the first time he hadn’t exactly measured up.

He was fresh off an indeterminate amount of time in New York, outwardly collected, but looking behind the eyes just as lost as the rest of them in his Martha’s Vineyard weekend-wear and an overflowing sincerity that didn’t quite match the world he’d dove headfirst into all for an old friend. (More than a friend, she amends now. And hadn’t she done a lot more for people that were far less than that?)

What had turned the tide for her on the matter of Sam happened in the predawn of a Midwestern miracle. He’d been standing in the orchid blue light of a sunrise that was yet to come, his back straight and his shoulders parted, the cut and cast of his face conviction. His voice was raw from days of yelling across their latest slapdash command center and his hands were cramped in weariness, but he stood there in front of Toby’s crossed arms and languid uncaring anyway and delivered the first speech that had ever taken Donna’s breath away.

Sam Seaborn was the believer and the believed, and Donna thought she hadn’t known truth, not really, until he came along. She was never meant to see that moment, but when she stepped into that pocket of time where it was just Sam, the papers in his hands, and the strength of his beliefs, something inside her corrected itself.

She remembers wanting to clap, but thinking it was a stupid thing to do. Sometimes when she looks at him now she wishes she had, but this isn’t one of those. This is one of the ones where she looks at him and can’t believe how far they’ve come or how lucky they all are.

He crooks a smile at her, the kind confidants share, says, “I really am,” and suddenly she’s got the strength of those beliefs too. Leave it to Beaver for family fun, leave it to Sam Seaborn to right the axes of the world every now and then when they need it.

“Hey, you never answered my question about you and Joey.”

Confession and memory dissolving on her tongue, Donna tells him her fourth truth. “I think it could be good, Sam. I think it could be really good.”

**Author's Note:**

> i'm hoping to lowkey keep a schedule and post part three sometime next friday! it'll be a prequel to both this fic and the last and serve some background on how we ended up here
> 
> i'm on tumblr @foxmulldr !!


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